Truman`s Decision On The Bomb

August 14, 1985|By Robert L. Messer, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

According to popular theory, the reason behind President Harry Truman`s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in early August, 1945, was to avoid a long and costly invasion of the Japanese homeland, which its fanatical leaders had vowed never to surrender. However, such a version of the past can no longer be sustained by the available historical evidence.

Documents discovered fairly recently in the Truman library indicate that before giving the bomb order, he had concluded that the Japanese were about to ``fold up.`` Even more to the point, he believed that their collapse would be precipitated by Soviet entry into the war, set for mid-August.

Truman knew, both from American intelligence sources and from the Russians directly, of Japanese attempts to negotiate a peace, using Moscow as an intermediary. A Soviet declaration of war would destroy Japan`s last hope for a mediated peace. As Truman put it in his recently discovered diary:

``Fini Japs when that comes about.`` The day after this diary entry, in a letter to his wife made public in 1983, Truman reiterated his conviction that Soviet entry would end the war a year sooner than expected.

Obviously, if the war was about to end as a result of the Soviet entry in August, the invasion of Japan, not scheduled to begin until November, was not the greater or more imminent evil Truman faced when he made the bomb decision. He had concluded that even without the bomb, the war would be over before the start of the invasion. The question on his mind was no longer when the war would end, but how and on whose terms.

While no longer encouraging it, Truman continued to welcome Soviet help in defeating Japan. But privately he put his hopes in a dual military-political weapon. He would use the bomb, without having told the Russians about it, in advance of their coming into the war. In this way, he might end the war without the dreaded invasion and at the same time pre-empt the Soviet claims for a share in what was to be an exclusively American victory.

It should be added that the recently released contemporary record also shows that Truman had an uninformed, distorted idea of what the price of that victory through atomic bombing would be. He apparently believed, or wanted to believe, that the bomb would be used against military targets. Later he privately admitted to having thought the population of the target cities to be around 60,000, when, in fact, four times that many lived in Hiroshima alone.

He knew nothing of radiation poisoning. But even before this unique aftermath of atomic war became painfully apparent, in fact the day after ``Fat Man`` exploded over Nagasaki, he told his Cabinet that there would be no more such attacks, because he could not bear the thought of killing ``all those kids.``

New evidence on Truman`s bomb decision, written at the time in his own hand, shows that the emerging Cold War did influence the timing and circumstances surrounding the end of the hot war with Japan. As his secretary of state put it at the time, Truman`s decision was at least partly based on his hope that ``Russia will not get in so much on the kill. . . .``

Such geopolitical motives may have been legitimate. The point here is that Truman never publicly made that case in defending his actions.

After 40 years, we now know, or should know, that private considerations of how best to contain Soviet influence did indeed enter the mind of the only man who could have changed the way the war ended and the atomic age began. We also should know, and learn from the fact, that these rational calculations of national interest by a man sincerely trying to do the right thing were based on misinformation and ignorance.